Chapter 25: Paulicians and Bogomiles

The Paulicians

In the Fourth Century, Armenian Christianity offered to their neighborhoring particularities the same landscape as that of the cities of Latium and Greece, if not the entire Empire: an ancient Christianity of an ascetic spirit, a pro-Roman clerical party that was better and better structured, Marcionite communities, local churches like founded by Paul of Samosate, and archaic cults either Christianized or including the Christ in their ecumenicism: Naassenes, Barbelites, Sethians, Valentinians, and sometimes all of these beliefs confounded together. (Contrary to what the majority of historians affirm, and as the sepulcher of the Aurelii shows.)

In Armenia, the pro-Roman faction tried to free itself from Montanist Christianity, Marcionite churches and the schools of Bardesane. Epiphanius, responsible for keeping track of the resistance movements for Roman Catholicism, mentioned a sect founded by a certain Peter of Kapharbarucha, which he designated “Archontics,” the doctrine of which was propagated by Eutacte of Satala. It syncretically picked out ideas from Marcionism and Barbelism. From Marcion it took his anti-Semitism and the dualism according to which the Demiurge, creator of an odious universe, was none other than Sabaoth, God of the Jews, who resided in the seventh heaven and governed the Hebdomade. [As for the influence of the Barbelites:] for the soul to rejoin its original Mother, it must elevate itself to the eighth heaven (Ogdoade). One is unfamiliar with the type of ecstatic practice that the union established with the adept, which was no doubt introduced with the help of incantations, so as to avoid the traps set by the henchmen of the abominable Sabaoth.[311] The Archontics did not care to practice baptism or the sacraments.

In 325, the monarchs embraced Catholicism due to complacency and diplomatically imposed it on their subjects. The Roman clerical faction thus took hold of the key posts and repressed all of the isolated pockets of resistance, which were quickly indexed in the catalogs of heresies, the descriptive files that inquisitorial police officers would use until the Eighteenth Century.

The Paulicians, who appeared in the middle of the Seventh Century in Armenia, seemed to have come from Samosate, from which they were chased by persecution. Fleeing Armenia and the combined zeal of the Church and the princes, they found refuge near Coloneia, under the suzerainty of the Arab caliph. In fact, a little before 630, the Arabs had seized the Byzantine provinces of North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Syria; they then threatened Byzantium, which was torn by internal struggles.

Although Peter of Sicily had tried to recommence the movement of Paul of Samosate, it is more credible to associate the Paulicians with Paul the Armenian who, from 699 to 718, consolidated it.

Dualists, the Paulicians did not adhere to the Manichean religion. Instead, their doctrine restored an archaic Gnostic Christianity, adapted to the Paulicians’ status as an embattled minority.

Peasants grouped in “free” agrarian communities, (*) the Paulicians became soldiers to resist any power that intended to feudalize them into tutelage. A good God supported their faith; the other, the God of Evil, was identified with Byzantine authority, which was intent on annihilating them. They did not bother with the sacraments, knew neither baptism, communion, penitence, nor marriage. They rejected fasting and Catholicism’s feast days. They execrated the cross, an instrument of punishment and death, and the cult of the saints and the icons, which perpetuated superstitious practices.

(*) The Paulician communalist model played a role in the peasant revolts in Asia Minor (820–824), which were led by Thomas the Slav.

The Paulicians’ Jesus was the angelos-christos. In the Old Testament they saw the work of the Demiurge. As for priests, they judged them to be useless, harmful and corrupt, and would not fail to kill them if the occasion presented itself.

They allowed no clergy, but accorded their trust to pastors tasked with preaching and to the didachoi or teachers who explained the sacred texts. Without tipping over into Marcion’s asceticism, the Paulicians were related to his type of primitive Christianity, which venerated the Apostle Paul and took exception to the authority of Peter.

The Paulicians began to be persecuted after their installation in Coloneia, where the bishop decimated them with the consent of the emperor. The first leader of their community, the Armenian Constantine, died at the stake in 682. His successor, Simeon, experienced the same fate in 688. But the Paulicians found among the Arabs a tolerance that was cruelly absent from the Catholics. Under the influence of Paul the Armenian, their doctrine — until then a form of Christianity that was common in 140 (except for baptism, which they refused, perhaps tardily) — took on a coloration that was more clearly hostile to the clergy and Catholicism.

Thereafter, their history is confounded with the atrocious war that Byzantium fought against them.

Ravaged by the conflict concerning the icons (726 to 843), the Empire turned its rage from away the Paulicians, so as to invest it in hostile factions, which the quarrel about the icons would set against each other. (The quarrel about these images only inflamed the endemic social war in which two factions confronted each other: the Blues, of aristocratic tendency, and the Greens, artisans mostly, often favorable to heterodoxy.)

In the spirit of Nestorius, the iconoclasts did not tolerate the figuration of the principle divinities but, unlike the Paulicians, they venerated the cross and nourished no sympathy for the signs of heresy. Moreover, the worst persecution took place on the initiative of the iconoclast Leon V (813–823). It continued under Theodora, who reestablished the cult of images.

Exterminated in Byzantium, the Paulicians asked for the help of the Arab emirs. Some of them sent the Islamic troops that harassed the imperial city. In 843, a punitive expedition from Byzantium triggered the rebellion of an officer named Corbeas, whose father, a Paulician, was impaled. He led a group of 5,000 men and founded an independent state in Temphric, where he made use of the benevolent aid of the emirs of Melitene and Tarse.

With his militia of soldier-peasants, Corbeas broke the offensive launched in 865 by Petrones, brother of the Empress Theodora. Two years later, he beat the army of Michel III. In 860, raids against Nicaea and Ephesus attested to the power of Tephric. Killed in battle in 863, Corbeas was replaced by Chrisocheir, formerly denounced by the patriach and heresiologue Photius.

The intervention of an embassador, Peter of Sicily, who had been sent among the Paulicians, was less an attempt at reconciliation than a spy mission, because, if Basile the First was defeated by Tephric in 870 or 871, the assassination by treachery of Chrisocheir in 872 caused the end of Tephric, which was sacked by Byzantium. The priests — inquisitors long before there was an Inquisition — organized the systematic massacre of the Paulicians, men, women and children. The escapees took refuge in the Balkans and Thrace, where Alexis Comnene would undertake to reduce them between 1081 and 1118.

In the Arab armies that seized Constantinople in 1453, there were Paulician Christians whose hatred of the oppressive Empire had fed the spirit of vengeance.

In 1717, in Philippopolis, there still existed a Christian community that venerated the Apostle Paul and refused to recognize the authority of Rome due to their hostility to the orthodox Church. Such believers exist today under the name “Uniats.”

The Bogomiles

“During the reign of the very-Christian Peter, there appeared on Bulgarian soil a priest named Bogomile (he who loves God); in truth, he called himself Bogunemil (he who is not loved by God). He was the first to propagate the heresy on Bulgarian soil.” Thus began the Treatise Against the Heretics, by the Unworthy Cosmas the Priest, a precious source of information about the movement that carried the name of its founder.

He who, with a complacent servility, called himself “unworthy priest” seized upon a letter sent by Theophyacte, patriach of Byzantium, to King Peter of Bulgaria (who died 969); in this letter the representatives “of a resurgent ancient heresy, a Manicheanism mixed with Paulicianism”[312] were anathematized.

In its specificity, and without precisely relying upon the Manichean religion, Bogomilism played the role of link between the Paulician communities, distant inheritors of Marcion and the Catharian beliefs that, starting in the Sixth Century, reached the Rhine Valley, Cologne, Flanders, Champagne, Northern Italy and Provence.

Initially governed by a landed, Boyar aristocracy and founded upon the Slavic rural commune, Bulgaria became feudalized in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Under the influence of the neighboring Byzantine Empire, its princes adopted Catholicism and, as elsewhere, imposed it on their subjects. Nothing is more false than the idea that there was a spontaneous conversion of the people to the doctrine of Rome and Byzantium. The Nazarene, Elchasaite, Marcionite, Valentinian, Montanist and Tertullianist Christianities inspired the adhesion of a growing number of the faithful; Catholicism was always propagated by the high [and mighty] on the persuasive point of a temporal sword. From 325 on, Catholicism ceased to be Christian, as Christianity ceased to be Jewish after 135. And, with greater rigor than the Jews did, Catholicism would deal with the adepts of Valdes’ voluntary poverty, with Michel of Cezene, with the apostolics who dreamed of reviving the Christianity of the New Prophecy, and with the reformers who, taking up the slack of the abhorred Church, would in their turn justify the massacre of the Anabaptists and the dissidents.

Colonized by the Byzantine clergy, Bulgaria was covered with monasteries and aimed to rid the peasantry of a “monastic vermin” that subsisted on the work of rural communities.

Bogomile’s doctrine did not bother with Manichean complexities. It professed a moderate dualism, in conformity with the antagonism of forces and the [political] interests under consideration.

God created the universe, that is to say, the seven heavens and the four elements (fire, air, water and earth). God, the resurgence of the plural God Elohim, reigned harmoniously over a cohort of angels, when one of them, Satanael, rebeled and was thrown to earth, which he separated from the water, thus creating — under the essentially divine light of the sun — the material universe and mankind. Nevertheless, Satanael included in the human body an angelic fragment, with the result that the duality of good and evil was incarnated in each person.

To aid humanity, God sent the angel Christ — still the angelos-christos. Satanael ordered that he be crucified, but the Messiah resuscitated, confounded his adversary and sent him to hell, thus exiling him from earth, which he would ceaselessly try to reconquer so as to finish his malevolent work. Thus Satanael had allies, all disposed towards restoring him to his privileges: kings, priests, the rich and the Church. Thus Bogomilism rediscovered in dualism the subversive ferment that had been propagated by the Paulicians, who were also attached to the independence and autarky of rural communities.

Hostile to the frequentation of churches, the Bogomiles called Saint Sophia the residence of demons. They mocked baptism: if water possessed such power, they remarked, then all of the animals, and especially the fish, were baptized. The rites of bread and wine were an absurd symbolism.

Without tilting into the excess of asceticism, the Bogomiles disapproved of the dissolute existence of the priests who summoned them to sanctify their souls, as Cosmas reported: “If you are saints, as you claim, why do you not live the life that Paul described to Timothy? The bishop must not have the least vise; he must marry only one woman; he must be sober, honest, correct and welcoming; he must be neither a drinker nor a quarreler, but a pleasing person who manages his house well. These priests are the inverse. They get inebriated; they steal; they give themselves up to vise in secret and there are no means to prevent them from doing so.”[313]

And Cosmas specified that, “the Bogomiles denigrate the rich; they teach their own not to submit to lords and to execrate the king. They spit upon the figure of the notables and disapprove of the Boyars and think that God shows hatred for all of those who serve the King and they teach all the serfs not to work for their lords.”[314] (To which Cosmas retorted: “All men must submit to the powers. It is not from the lords that God comes.”)

Like the Paulicians, the Bogomiles mocked the saints, the icons and the relics, which were sources of profitable commerce. In the cross they saw a simple piece of wood that they called “the enemy of God.” To them the miracles of the Christ were fables that had to be interpreted symbolically. (In the Seventeenth Century, the Englishman Thomas Woolston would die in prison for supporting this very thesis.)

Rejecting the Old Testament, which was the work of Satanael, the Bogomiles preferred a version of the Gospel attributed to John, in its ancient form as a Gnostic text.

The old Gnosticism also put its seal on the Bogomiles’ two-tiered organization: the Perfect Ones, or Christians, who were the active and intellectual kernel (those who save), and the believers, who were peasants and bourgeois for whom pistis sufficed.

The Bogomiles named consolamentum a form of sacrament through which the neophyte acceded to the staus of perfection by having the Gospel attributed to John placed on his head as a sign of the assembly’s acquiescence.

The Perfect Ones ate no meat, preached, did not work, and received no tithes. All of the believers received the consolamentum on their death-bed or at an advanced age.

Who was Bogomile? A Macedonian priest who was initially loyal to the Church of Byzantium and Rome. Revolted by the situation of the peasants, who were victims of war, the Boyars and the clergy, he broke with Catholicism and preached in the region of Skopje and in Thrace.

Cosmas contrasted Bogomile with the official doctrine: “The priests of the true faith, even if they are lazy, do not offend God,” and “It is ordered that you honor the officials, even if they are bad [...] The men of the Church are always consecrated by God.”[315]

Cosmas furnished a simple and ecumenically convincing explanation for the miseries of the world that satisfied or would satisfy the Hebrew religion, the papacy and Calvin: “Each of us must ask ourselves [...] if this is not why God put war on the earth.”[316] Such was not the opinion of Bogomile and his partisans, who were more and more numerous.

Events provided Bogomilism with a foundation that wasn’t only social, but national, as well, because, in 1018, Emperor Basile II put an end to the existence of the Bulgarian kingdom and crushed the nation under the yoke of Byzantine authority. Under the cover of the peasant uprisings, to which the nobility and the towns now gave their aid, the Bogomile influence polarized the resistance to the Empire; it invaded the cities, crossed the frontiers and reached Byzantium, despite constant and cruel persecution.

Euthyme of Acmone, who pursued the Bogomiles with a completely clerical hatred, called them fundaiagites, that is, “carriers of the double-sack,” “truly impious people who in secret serve the devil.”[317] Euthyme’s diatribes still nourished the zeal of the persecutor Alexis Comnene in the Twelfth Century.

In the Twelfth Century, the Bogomile movement was implanted in Byzantium. Anne Comnene, daughter of the emperor, left a recital that was edified by the manner in which one of the city’s Perfect Ones was captured and put to death in 1111:

A certain monk by the name of Basile excelled in the teaching of the heresy of the Bogomiles. He had twelve students whom he called his apostles, having attracted several converts, who were perverted women living bad lives that spread evil everywhere. The evil ravaged many souls with the rapidity of fire.

Certain Bogomiles were led to the palace and everything indicated that Basile was their master and the leader of the heresy. One among them, by the name of Divlati, was put in prison and interrogated so as to denounced them; at first, he did not consent to do so, but, after having been subjected to torture, he denounced Basile and the apostles that he had chosen. Then the Emperor sent many people to find him. And one [of them] discovered Satan’s Archisatrape, Basile, a man in a monk’s habit, with an emaciated face, without beard or mustache, very tall, an expert in the art of teaching heresy.

The Emperor, wishing to learn the secret mystery from him, invited Basile under a special pretext. He descended from his throne to go meet Basile, invited him to his own table, held out to him all of the sinner’s snares, and baited his fishing-hook so that it would catch this monstrous omnivore. Many times tempering his hatred and disgust for the monk, the Emperor weighed Basile down with flattery and he feigned to want to become Basile’s student and, not only he, but his brother, Isaac, as well; the Emperor affected to recognize divine revelation in each of Basile’s words and submitted himself to Basile in all things, on the condition that the wicked Basile would implore the salvation of his soul... And Basile then unveiled all of the heresy’s doctrines. But what made him do this?

The Emperor had previously ordered that a curtain be installed in the corridor between the part reserved for the women and the spot in which he found himself [alone] with the demon, so that Basile would unmask himself before everyone and reveal everything that he had been hiding in his soul. Hidden behind the curtain, one of the clerics would write down everything that was said. Suspecting nothing, this imbecile [Basile] began to preach, the Emperor played the student, and the cleric wrote down ‘the teachings’ ... But what happened then?

The Emperor drew back the curtain and snatched away his mask. He then convened the Church’s entire synod, all of the military leaders and the entire senate. An assembly was convoked, presided over by the venerated patriach of the imperial city, Nicolas Gramatik. In front of everyone, the diabolical doctrine was read aloud, and it was impossible to deny the accusations. The leader of the accused would not renounce his ideas and soon defended them openly. He declared that he was ready for the flames, to submit to the punishment of the whip and to experience a thousand deaths...

Basile, a veritable heretic, refused to repent. This was why the members of the holy synod, the most worthy monks and Nicolas himself decided that Basile deserved to be burned alive. The Emperor, who had often spoken with Basile and was convinced that he was of bad faith and would never deny his heresy, adopted this opinion [openly]. The order was given to erect a large pyre in the Hippodrome. A deep pit was dug and very tall tree trunks were piled into it and then covered with leaves, one might say [making] a thick forest. When the pyre was lit, an immense crowd entered the Hippodrome and sat on the tiers, impatient for the events to begin. The following day, a cross was erected so that the impure one had the possibility — if he feared the flames — to deny his heresy and lead himself towards the cross. In the audience there were a great number of heretics who came to watch their leader Basile...

The excited crowd gave him the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the horrible spectacle that the pyre presented; he felt the heat of the fire and saw the flames that crackled, which rose like tongues of fire up to the top of the granite obelisk that was erected in the middle of the Hippodrome.

This spectacle did not make Basile hesitate; he remained inflexible. The fire had not yet melted his iron will, no more than the Emperor’s promises did... .

Then the executioners seized Basile by his clothes, raised him up high and then threw him, completely clothed, into the pyre. The flames, which became furious (one says), swallowed the impure one without releasing any odor; the smoke remained the same [color], there only appeared in the smoke a white ray among the flames. This is how they stood up to the impious.[318]

The execution of Basile and a great number of his partisans did not hinder the progress of Bogomilism. In 1167, another Perfect One left Byzantium for Italy and France, so as to unite assemblies: the West would come to know him as “Pope Nikta.”

Despite the extermination-politics of the Serbian and Bosnian prines, the missionary activity of Bogomilism did not stop multiplying its churches: the Bulgarian Church, the Church of Dragovjit (Thrace), the Greek Church, the Patarene Church (Bosnia), the Church of Philadelphia (Serbia). Bogomilism would find popular support among those who reacted against Rome’s prohibition of the use of autochtonic languages in the liturgy, but also among fighters for independence.

The Bosnian Church, for a time recognized by the princes, was subjected to new persecutions from 1443 to 1461, and due to its hatred of Catholicism, would willingly turn towards the Turks. “This was why, when Bosnia fell under Ottoman domination, a great number of its inhabitants adopted the Muslim religion.”[319]

Meanwhile, the Bulgarian adepts, called “Bulgari” [bougres], tried to instaurate — in opposition to Rome — impossible peaceful communities, fraternal and little inclined to martyrdom, from Milan to Languedoc, and from Cologne to Flanders and Orleans.